I just want this effing gig that provides less than 5% of my income and has taken waaaaaaaay more than 5% of my practice time to be freaking over already. Jeez. (You know I'm cranky when I go full circle from fake swearing through real swearing to fake swearing again.) One more day. 21 hours from now, I will be pouring red wine down my gullet to decompress a little, because all the gigs requiring major prep will be over.

Anyway...New York English: "happy holidays" is what we say to wish someone a pleasant December/January celebration. It's politically incorrect to wish someone a merry Christmas here, because, well, what if they're Jewish or something? So cocktail and background gigs this time of year can be awkward, knowing some people want to hear holiday music, some people are offended that their minority religion is underrepresented by holiday music, and some people are sick to death of the same damn songs being forced up their eardrums by our capitalist pig consumer economy boombox since mid-October.

And that's where songs about cold weather come in. Today's song - written by a Jew, like many good cold weather songs and in fact many popular Christmas songs (money moeny money...side note: these songwriters are savvier than I - see 1st paragraph regarding 5%) - ahem, today's song is a lovely AABA tune... with a twist. For all my worshipful praise of 32-bar AABA form, none of the standards I've picked recently have been that clear cut. "Embraceable You", "A Foggy Day" and "Moon River" are all ABAC: question-answer, question-different answer. "Moon River"'s C is fourteen bars long (the rest of the sections are a more normal eight). "I've Got My Love..." definitely has a discernible bridge, new key and everything ("off with my overcoat) - but while the bridge is Ye Olde Normal Eight, all the A sections are sixteen bars long - two eight-bar phrases each, a question and an answer. Best of both worlds. So, if you were really, really nerdy like me, you could, if you had nothing better to do, analyze it as (AB)(AB)C(AB).

Or you could just sit down and play it like a normal human. I've played this one from the sheet music many times. It's one of those handy holiday season songs where, if I'm doing a little improvising over the form to stretch it out and it's gone on rather long enough but then I see a couple guys in suits and yarmulkes walk by, I'll take another chorus. And now I know that the long A sections have collectively given me an extra twenty-four bars to stall with.

Fun with standards: tonight I listened to the Ella and Billie versions I already own, then looked on youtube and playlist to investigate other versions. Listened to Dean Martin's, part of Frank Sinatra's (could only find a snippet), and a dance remix of Kay Starr singing it. New discovery, Kay Starr. That track, which I ended up downloading, will be handy for days when I decide to prance around my living room for my cat's entertainment because I can't get it together to go to the gym.